I just hope they have someone there in the writer's room to direct the plot and keep it faithful to the mythology of the games. The movie made the mistake of assuming we already know who these characters are while also completely disregarding their back stories from the games we played, those very same backstories that kept us as fans invested in this franchise which led to the success of keeping this franchise alive for 30 plus years. I still can't get over how the first movie unceremoniously used key characters like Goro, Mileena, Reiko, Reptile, and Sub-Zero as cannon fodder before the tournament even started. If they attempt to revive them to be used for the sequel I feel like that would be a huge mistake as well. I am curious to see who is going to be Outworld's defending Champion now that Goro is dead. If they decide to make Shao Kahn the defending Champion on Shang Tsung's island we completely waste the plot line for MK2's tournament that takes place in Outworld. We might just skip that whole chapter in the story over and go right into the Invasion of Earth in MK3, which is exactly what happened with MK: Annihilation and that movie bombed. I'm sorry to say but I'm concerned this second film is going to take lazy liberties with the plot thinking they're giving us an authentic experience in theatres but we may be seeing the plot points we had back in the 90's only with a new shiny coat of paint with modern looks and special effects and the R-rating.
I want to use Sub-Zero as an example of my concerns about the direction of this franchise. We all know Joe Taslim is returning as Noob Saibot and as a fan of the source material I feel like they are playing that card too early. Sub-Zero and Scorpion were always meant to have their confrontation at the Mortal Kombat tournament, and Sub-Zero as menacing as he was in the first film always served more as an anti-hero due to his history with Raiden, Shinnok, and Quan Chi and his relationship to his younger brother Kuai Liang humanizes him. We're going into a Mortal Kombat movie without a Sub-Zero now, only for Noob Saibot to fill the role of that character who was integral to the plot of the first game. If you are going to kill off an iconic character like that we should have been introduced to Kuai Liang who would don the iconic look and have his journey start in the sequel to this next film with him trying to figure out what happened to his older brother with the plot line of MK2. These films might just skip all of that. With the games we only had a few screens with text that described our favorite characters and have not really had those further explored in any other medium except for the starting screens from the arcades and character endings from beating the game. In the games Bi-Han is a complicated character who was there at the first tournament to assassinate Shang Tsung, Scorpion shows up and is basically out to send him to hell with him, awesome plot line that was re-told in MK9 and Scorpion's Revenge but never in live action. In the reboot, Bi-Han basically kills Scorpion in feudal Japan and then hangs out for a few centuries in Outworld to just be summoned by Shang Tsung to kill Earth's chosen warriors behind the Elder God's backs. Scorpion himself is reduced to a character that is summoned through an object, Scorpion's whole point of revenge was that his bloodline was wiped out which is why he returns from hell after Sub-Zero's head. Cole Young is his living legacy, with that knowledge as a character Hanzo Hasashi should be at peace knowing his bloodline lives on. The games painted a way better storyline where Sub-Zero was only there as a job and was ready to retire, give me that Sub-Zero, not the pawn or the henchman that we got in the 1995 film and this reboot. I fear that Noob Saibot is going to be the same Sub-Zero from the first movie ready for a rematch with Scorpion only this time with a darker paint job on his ninja garb.
I can go on and on about how the first movie makes me have no faith in this sequel, but regardless I am going to watch it. I just hope when they say they learned lessons from the first movie, those lessons are to be better versed in the games storyline and not give us a big budget team up movie devoid of character development but will expect us to love it because they're adding gore to the movies this time around.
